I thought it would be simple once Mikey and I became one. To get them to laugh. To turn sadness into happiness, to change the world, shatter their assumptions, break their idols and make them happy. Simply happy. They were so aggressive, so destructive, but laughter would solve it all.
But they wouldn’t laugh. Why didn’t the Priests understand, in Orientation Chamber, that they could not laugh? They are not like us. Their complexity, their convoluted, crazy world, it cannot respond to laughter.
The Priests didn’t know. They did not understand the situation. They had misappraised. But I know now. I have learned.
The question is—what do I do now? To get it back. Retrieve the mission. A serious mission, to bring frivolity? Infect with laughter, infect the world? What can I do, stuck away in this loony bin, with all these—
Then all at once I know what to do. And fall down
in awe, for the Priests understood after all. How to bring the mission, where to execute it, my very failure the necessary stepping stone to my success.
Begin right at home, of course. What better place than a nuthouse for laughter?
So I hold a meeting after lights-out and before the meds kick in. Tommy is sleepy and mumbling as usual about the Government. James is preparing for his Second Coming. Arnold is moaning and rocking. Dorian— Well, you don’t want to know what Dorian is doing. The orderlies are somewhere down the corridor, of course. They don’t care. A typical night.
“Well, folks,” I say, “Do you want to change the world?
They become quiet. No more Government or Return of the Son. They have never heard me say anything serious before. They have barely heard me speak. I sure have their attention. The orderlies yap on, I hear their voices from down the hall.
“If we change the world, will you change the Government so they won’t be after me anymore?” Tommy asks.
“We’ll have a different Government, sure,” I say.
“But will they show any compassion? Will they leave good citizens alone?”
“Great compassion. All the compassion you could possibly want and more of it.”
Tommy considers this. James says, “Government can’t change. The world can’t change until the second coming.”
“I am the second coming,” I say. “I begged pass this cup and they did not listen and now I am here.”
They say nothing to this.
“Blessed are the light of heart because they shall uplift the world.”
“Amen,” James says and crosses himself.
“The Lord God is a God of Laughter,” I tell them. “Just read the second Psalm.” Psalms had occupied a lot of my time years ago. When Mommy went off to cry.
“You get a lot of good information from the Psalms,” I say. “You’d be surprised what is in there. Harps and lyres and whatnot.”
“I don’t know what lyres are. What we gotta do?”
“We laugh,” I say. “That is how it begins. And then we do things to make everyone laugh. If each of us make two others laugh, and each of those take on another two, we can take over the world.”
“Just laugh?” James says doubtfully.
“That’s it.’
‘Seems pretty silly to me,” Arnold says. “But it beats the crappy therapy and basket weaving. Sounds like more fun than Basic Living Skills, too.”
Carlo, Ben, Jamal, Kenneth, Dorian, and the others come to join us. The whole men’s ward. “Try it,” I say. “Ha.”
“Ha.”
It begins so feebly.
Ha.
But it builds. Piece by piece, sound by sound, we give to the world the sounds which the world deserves, which it has always needed. Ha and ha and ha again. And the orderlies come with their syringes and restraints, but there are too many of us, so they call the nurses, but there are still too many of us, as we hear the sacred syllable of redemption from Wards 3 and 4, so they call the doctors, but there are still too many of us, as the women’s wards begin, ha and ha and more ha.
And the plates go flying, the people go flying, until the top of the nuthouse itself is levitated by our laughter, lifted by that sound, twinkles and twirls at that sudden elevation and as Arnold and James and Jamal and Carlo and Ben and Dorian and Kenneth and I continue that levitating laughter it seems to overtake the world itself; manifest silken strands of light and laughter penetrating the closed and open spaces.
There is much more to this, but it is not for me to tell that story. My story is of origins, masques, and the sudden flight of running blood. Of contagion, cell to cell, voice to voice, echo to echo. From here, it is for the Kings and the Popes, the Presidents and the Preachers, the Priests and the Headquarters to take over that fierce obligation of laughter, laughter as hot as the sun, burning into all the spaces and places of human habituation.
Hi, Mikey.
Good-bye, Mikey.
Finita la commedia.
HARVESTING
by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
I STEPPED OUT of the dimension gate at the forest’s edge. The sun was high overhead. It always disconcerted me when I wound up in a different time zone, which was ridiculous, because I always did. At home, it was the hour before the evening rush at the restaurant; here it was before noon, a good time to harvest.
It was hot and humid in the half-dark below the trees. Unfamiliar, sparkling bugs whined. The air smelled swampy. Sweat started all over me. I shifted the packstraps on my shoulders.
A small dirt-brown boy with only two arms and legs stooped among low, light-green plants in a clearing nearby. He had a string bag in his hand. He was picking wild lettuce. On his back was another string bag, with three glass balls the sizes of fists in it, separated from each other with moss, each visible in subtle, glowing colors, gleaming in the green-filtered forest sunlight through the meshes of the string. I had never seen anything like those globes before, but I could tell just from their sight and scent that they were valuable, full of promises.
Anger rose in my throat. I wanted to kill someone. I drew my big knife.
“Hey,” I said to the boy. He looked up, startled, then thumped back on his heels. “Let me help you.” I sliced through the stems of many baby lettuces at once, angling my blade so that the severed plants flew toward the boy.
“What?” His eyes were wide, his eyebrows up.
“Pick fast. You shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous.” Who would send a boy alone into a demon wood with such globes strapped to his back? Home in my hive, we wouldn’t let such little ones out at all. His skin wasn’t thick enough to survive brushes with reality.
What if I were hunting meat instead of fungus? Such a young, soft creature, tender and tasty. I wasn’t the only one who came to gather in these woods. Node pull was strong here.
He put the sheared lettuce into his bag, glanced at me and away, his face flushed. I squatted nearby, the blade dangling between my foreknees. “Who sent you here?” I asked.
I could hardly concentrate on my own words. The globes on his back glistened and called to me. “Own us,” they whispered. “Caress us. If you have us, everything snarled in your life will straighten out. All you need is us.”
“Who sent you here with those things on your back? Don’t they know you’re in danger?” I scythed more lettuce for him.
He licked his lips. He placed the lettuce in his bag one small plant at a time. Why wasn’t he picking them in armfuls? He had to be quick.
“We want to be with you,” the globes whispered. “We don’t like it where we are now. We’ll make all your heart’s dreams come true. Take us.”
I grabbed the bag out of the boy’s hand and stuffed it full of lettuce. I handed it back. “Go home,” I told him. Why was I bothering with this boy? I was only on this world to get swamp truffles for tonight’s special dish at the most expensive restaurant on my world.